


This Love, Like Fallen Leaves

by phosphorous



Series: Haikyuu One-shot Collection | Multiple Universes [6]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Royalty, Angst, Author Knows Nothing About Harps or Love, Crown Prince!Oikawa Tooru, F/M, Gen, Guard!Iwaizumi Hajime, I Don't Know Why He Just Does, Oikawa Plays Harp, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:02:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23159740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phosphorous/pseuds/phosphorous
Summary: There’s a flower in his hair. A pink carnation, from one of the little girls braiding flower crowns with the nobles. He plucks the strings of his harp with gentle fingers, absentminded and lazy, but the song that formulates is nothing short of beautiful.
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Series: Haikyuu One-shot Collection | Multiple Universes [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579000
Comments: 6
Kudos: 79





	This Love, Like Fallen Leaves

It’s the first summer after the queen’s passing. The pale yellow flowers are in full bloom in the palace gardens, sunshine filtering through the sliver of space between the leaves and creating patterns on the ground, birds singing on every odd branch as the servants eagerly rush back to the castle after collecting apples from the orchard. Hajime can recall standing shoulder to shoulder with Hanamaki last year in this very same place, with the same sun burning the side of his face as the king’s coffin was carried away to the cemetery. The pattern of clouds in the sky almost look the same too. 

But it’s not what it was. An eternity has passed since then. The queen is dead and the peonies she had loved so much looked like they’re withering at the edges and everything in the world feels like it’s been moved half an inch to the right. The crown prince is no longer locked up in his tower as he had been when the queen was carried away to her grave. Instead, he’s sitting by the statue of the goddess of song and music, the water in the fountain lighting up his eyes like diamonds in liquid tar.

There’s a flower in his hair. A pink carnation, from one of the little girls braiding flower crowns with the nobles. He plucks the strings of his harp with gentle fingers, absentminded and lazy, but the song that formulates is nothing short of beautiful. 

His highness had always been exemplary at the harp, even back when he was seven and his mother had to guide him one string at a time. Hajime remembers, clear as day, that his favorite song used to be  _ Blue Sky  _ because it was easy. He used to make Hajime sing along, like they were teacher and student in a music classroom and not the fated crown prince and the son of a blacksmith. They’d always have to start over because his highness said that  _ Iwa-chan is a bad singer, but I know he can do better _ .

His highness stops playing, and the last note of  _ The Heart is an Ocean  _ remains suspended in the air like a raindrop clinging onto the edge of a roof.

He says, “I don’t want to be alone with anyone at this evening’s festivities.”

Translation:  _ make sure they don’t ask to talk to me alone. Stick with me until it ends, and get me out if necessary. _

“Understood, your highness,” Hajime says, and the prince’s shoulders shift as he moves towards the harp again, bringing his fingers to the strings. 

“They’re all suitors.” His highness says.

And Hajime thinks,  _ oh,  _ because  _ of course  _ it would be suitors. The prince comes from a royal lineage. The prince is well-read, a well-rounded fighter and an excellent diplomat. The prince is compassionate and brilliant and anyone who meets him is immediately taken with him. The prince is twenty one years old and he sparkles like honey on glass when he stands in the sun. Of course the next course of action will be marriage for him. 

Hajime imagines there’s no shortage of suitors hoping for his hand in marriage. He wonders why he’s so bitter about it.

Suddenly, he remembers being fifteen and thinking that the prince had cold hands the first night he linked their hands together under the stars. He remembers being fifteen and feeling the prince’s fingers against his robes when he held him like he thought that Hajime would disappear if he let go. (“My mother is sick. She’s going to die, and I can’t do anything about it.”) He remembers, strangely, the first time they’d kissed in the rain when they were seventeen, hidden under the cover of the black cloaks worn by everyone in the dingy bar they snuck out to.

They weren’t the crown prince and the blacksmith’s son that day. They were in over their heads, is what they were.

_ (You’ll be happier without whatever this is,  _ nineteen year old Hajime had told him.  _ It seems great now because we’re young and stupid, but we’re actually worlds apart. And I don’t want to lose you because we’re stupid and decided to have an affair.) _

“Your highness,” Hajime starts, and he wonders if he’s speaking out of turn now, “you should give them a chance.”

“I’m sure that’ll allow your conscience to rest easy.” His highness says, and when he speaks, he sounds tired and much, much older than he is. 

_ (You don’t get to decide that for me,  _ his highness had said, and it was only the fact that his voice was shaking that made him seem younger than he really was.)

He plucks a string on the harp, the second last furthest from him.

The sound it makes sounds, strangely, of pebbles landing in the bottom of the well three or four feet into the forest. His highness was eleven and he’d let Hajime pull him by the sleeve of his robes until he gave up and let himself be led into the forest where they’d pluck pebbles to throw into the well. 

_ Just this once, Oikawa,  _ Hajime would say, and his highness would crossly glare until he found a particularly pretty pebble that he didn’t want to throw away.

“I’ve been in love with you since we were nineteen,” he finally says, and it’s the first time in two years either of them had mentioned it. It feels like a spell breaking around Hajime when the prince slowly turns to him and his eyes are cold despite the sunshine in them. “You can’t ask me to throw it all away for the sake of expectations.”

( _ If you want me, still,  _ the prince had started, his voice drowsy and sleep addled,  _ I’m here. I’m always thinking about you _ . 

He was twenty years old and wine drunk, cherry stains on his mouth from the jar of preserves by his bedside table.

And maybe it was the fact that he wouldn’t remember again, but Hajime had run a hand through his hair and told him,  _ yeah, I’m always thinking about you too. _ )

“You don’t always have to stay five paces behind me, Iwa-chan,” the prince adds, like he always does when they’re alone. “There’s always a place for you by my side.”

Like he always does when they’re alone, Hajime bites his tongue and doesn’t say anything to it, even though he wishes, more than anything else, that he was brave enough to tell Oikawa that there was nothing more he’d want than to spend the rest of eternity next to him. 

  
The prince looks away and runs his fingers along the strings of the harp, not quite touching them. This time, when he plucks a string, the opening note of  _ Blue Sky  _ cuts through the air like a knife, and Hajime feels, strangely, like a bit of his heart is withering away like the peonies by his feet.

**Author's Note:**

> twitter: odasakusa


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